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# Weekend Words: Tree
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/weekend-words-tree/
- Published: 2014-12-07T14:30:45.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T16:32:17.000Z
- Description: This week, The New York Times cheerfully reported on "the leafing of New York": the cityscape transformed by hundreds of thousands of trees planted over the past few decades.
- Author: Weekend Editors
- Tags: Opinion, Weekend, Weekend Words, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-24 07:08 (2014, 2015, part 2)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2014/12/tree.jpg)

Cesare da Sesto, “Study of a Tree” (n.d.), pen and ink over black chalk on blue paper, 392 x 265 mm. Royal Collection, Windsor (image via Web Gallery of Art)

This week, *The New York Times* cheerfully [reported](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/02/nyregion/in-leafy-blitz-trees-spring-up-in-a-changing-new-york.html?ref=nyregion) on “the leafing of New York”: the cityscape transformed by hundreds of thousands of trees planted over the past few decades.

> “I shall be like that tree, I shall die at the top.”  
>  
> **—Jonathan Swift**

> “When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.”  
>  
> **—Marc Chagall**

> “Trees are the earth’s endless effort to speak to the listening heaven.”  
>  
> **—Rabindranath Tagore**

> “I think that I shall never see  
> A billboard lovely as a tree.  
> Perhaps, unless the billboards fall,  
> I’ll never see a tree at all.”  
>  
> **—Ogden Nash, “Song of the Open Road”**

> “No motion has she now, no force;  
> She neither hears nor sees;  
> Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course,  
> With rocks, and stones, and trees.”  
>  
> **—William Wordsworth, “A slumber did my spirit seal”**

> “I never see that prettiest thing  
> A cherry bough gone white with Spring,  
> But what I think, ‘How gay ‘twoud be  
> To hang me from a flowering tree.”  
>  
> **—Dorothy Parker, “Cherry White”**

> “I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than others things do.”  
>  
> **—Willa Cather, *O Pioneers!***

> “If we surrendered  
> to earth’s intelligence,  
> we could rise up rooted like trees.”  
>  
> **—Rainer Maria Rilke, *The Book of Hours: Love Poems to God***

> “I don’t have to look up my family tree, because I know that I’m the sap.”  
>  
> **—Fred A. Allen**

> “I could be content that we might procreate like trees, without conjunction, or that there were any way to perpetuate the world without this trivial and vulgar way of coition.”  
>  
> **—Sir Thomas Browne**